Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/291

Rh than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant the next day reminded her of the nearness of her peril. How could she have played with her fate so lightly—she, who held her life so dear because she felt in it such untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to listen to Amherst’s account of his work, with enough outward self-possession to place the right comment and put the right question, yet conscious only of the quiet strength she was absorbing from his presence, of the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.

In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs, Amherst continued to acquit himself mechanically of his duties, against the incongruous back-ground of his predecessor’s remarkable sporting-prints—for it was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook that his life there was carried on in the setting of foils and boxing-gloves, ﬁrearms and racing-trophies, Which had expressed Dick Westmore’s ideals. Never very keenly alive to his material surroundings, and quite unconscious of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come to accept his wife’s guests as unquestioningly as their background, and with the same sense of their being an inevitable part of his new life. Their talk was no more intelligible to him than the red and yellow hieroglyphics of the racing—prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr. Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent [ 275 ]